With apologies for duplicate postings...

University of Rochester Receives Mellon Grant 
for eXtensible Catalog (XC)

The University of Rochester’s River Campus Libraries have received a
$283,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to begin planning and
requirements analysis for the development of an open-source online system to
unify access to traditional and digital library resources. The new system,
known as eXtensible Catalog (XC), has the potential to allow future library
users to get more out of academic library collections, and to give academic
libraries more control over how best to help library users gather information. 

The first phase of the analysis will produce a plan that will include:

§	A survey of related projects that will assess the feasibility of bringing
together and building upon work being done at other institutions 
§	An analysis of freely-available source code that could be incorporated
into the development of XC 
§	Outreach to other academic institutions doing similar work at libraries 
§	Recommendations for the metadata requirements of the new system, informed
by data models that focus on how metadata helps people gather and understand
information 
§	An analysis of existing user studies and recommendations for additional
studies of user practices to guide the development of XC 
§	An analysis of needs for the XC system within academic libraries

The complete press release for the project is available at:
http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=2518.  For additional information,
please contact one of the XC Co-Principal Investigators:
David Lindahl, Director of Digital Initiatives ([log in to unmask])
Jennifer Bowen, Head of Cataloging ([log in to unmask])
Nancy Fried Foster, Lead Anthropologist ([log in to unmask])    


Jennifer Bowen
Head of Cataloging
University of Rochester